A few days before my interview with Rachel Reeves, I saw her at a party. The room was packed with Labour MPs and advisers, dancing to Things Can Only Get Better and discussing whether they could really be on the verge of regaining power. But Reeves – wearing a striking green dress and with a glass of wine in her hand – was deep in conversation with George Osborne. It gave a fascinating insight into the woman who could soon be Britain’s first female chancellor.
Reeves is sufficiently open-minded, non-tribal, pragmatic and intellectually self-confident to seek advice from a political rival. She is willing to listen to anyone who might make her better at her job.
“Obviously he’s on a different side of politics, but he is the last person to have gone from the position of shadow chancellor to chancellor, so it’s interesting to talk to him about that transition,” she tells me. “How many of the policies have to be ready to go or how much will the civil service do when you arrive? How can you prepare from opposition? How clear do you need to be from day one about what your priorities are? He’s intensely political and so am I.”
They may come from opposing parties but she says that becoming an MP has actually made her “less tribal”, not more.
I ask Osborne whether he thinks Reeves would make a good chancellor. “She is clearly intelligent and serious and that’s what the job requires,” he replies. “There are some important things she’s getting right. Above all with the shadow chancellor people have to look at you and think they can trust you with their money. I think she’s well on her way.”
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He says he has known her for years and worked closely with her husband, Nick Joicey, a senior civil servant, when they were both at the Treasury. “After a period of politics where on both sides there haven’t been people I thought were up to the job, I now feel that with Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt and Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves we have two sets of people who are sensible and have integrity and are more than capable of governing the country. I’m still a Conservative so I would rather have Rishi and Jeremy, but it wouldn’t be terrible for the country if it were Keir and Rachel.”
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If the polls are to be believed, then there is a good chance that it will be the Labour double act taking over after the next general election. Reeves, who is still only 43, would become chancellor at a time of extraordinary economic uncertainty amid a cost of living crisis, soaring inflation and global turbulence. She is already starting to prepare mentally and politically for that moment. Recently she and Starmer met Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, to discuss the turmoil in the markets. The shadow chancellor is thinking carefully about what her “first hundred days” at the Treasury would involve.
But she insists she is not complacent. Her more immediate task is to convince the voters that Labour has the economic credibility on which victory will depend. She has become one of Starmer’s most trusted political allies and is described by other shadow cabinet ministers as the Labour leader’s “secret weapon”, even though she is refusing to let them spend any money. It is “naive”, she says, for the party to think that it can win an election without persuading the electorate that it can do the sums.
A few years ago, one television executive described Reeves as “boring snoring” after a particularly wooden Newsnight interview. Now she is one of the most powerful and interesting figures at Westminster. As we speak for more than an hour and a half, I don’t find her dull at all. The former Bank of England economist may be clever and sensible – a self-proclaimed “girlie swot” – but she also has a sense of humour and a deep throaty laugh that sounds as if she has just heard a particularly dirty joke.
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When she is not rushing her two young children (a boy aged seven and a girl of nine) to swimming or choir practice, she is an aficionado of live music. She loves Ronnie Scott’s, the Soho jazz club, and recently went to a modern production of Carmen at Opera North in Leeds. Last summer she attended the Adele concert in Hyde Park. Those who know her best say that away from work she has an enormous sense of fun. I hear stories from one friend about late-night wild swimming in a lake. Lord O’Neill of Gatley, the former Goldman Sachs economist who was a Treasury minister under Osborne and has just completed a review of start-up companies for Reeves, says, “I like her. She seems really normal, which is quite unusual in politics, and she’s obviously pretty smart.”
Raised in southeast London, Reeves is the daughter of two primary school teachers and went to a comprehensive. The Westminster snobs are dismissive of her slightly nasal twang, although as she points out, “In Leeds [her constituency is Leeds West], people just think I’ve got a southern accent.” But Reeves says she has been underestimated all her life.
“I don’t have impostor syndrome,” she says. “But I’m certainly aware of the fact that, from my background and my school, it’s quite a surprise I am where I am today. I feel a huge pride in that. When my mum and dad had me, they certainly wouldn’t have anticipated that one day I’d be knocking on the door to be chancellor.”
Reeves is not daunted by the thought of being Britain’s first female chancellor because she has thrived in a succession of male-dominated environments. As a child she was a highly competitive chess player, who won her first match when she was 7 and became a national champion at 14. Her father used to drive her all over the country to play against other schools.
“It was mainly boys. I remember at one tournament I was drawn against a boy and his friend came over and said, ‘Oh, lucky you. You’ve got a girl. You’ll win, no problem.’ And I thought, ‘You’re certainly not going to win.’ I beat him and I was really pleased with myself.”
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She was also one of the few state-school pupils playing in the competitions and still remembers another child’s father expressing surprise that she had got such good GCSE results from her school, Cator Park. “It gave me a determination not to be put off by people making assumptions about me and not to be patronised,” she says. “I persevered. I have always had a thing about proving that I’m just as good as anyone else.”
There are, she says, obvious parallels between chess and politics. “It’s about being able to look ahead. You’re moving your pieces, but they’re also moving theirs. You’ve got to constantly update what you’re doing based on what they’re doing.” Although she describes herself now as “a cautious person” and a “worrier” who is not a natural risk-taker, she says she was “quite an aggressive” chess player. “I was always going for the attack, which sometimes did leave me a bit exposed. I think it’s about navigating environments that aren’t always comfortable or easy.”
When she joined the Bank of England after university, she was one of only 6 women among the 37 graduate recruits. She was seconded to the British embassy in Washington DC, where she met her husband (who now works at the Department for Work and Pensions), then spent three years working for Halifax Bank of Scotland in Leeds. The banking sector has “changed” beyond all recognition since then, she says.
“I’ve spent quite a bit of time with Alison Rose, the chief executive of NatWest. It’s absolutely brilliant that she’s there and Amanda Blanc at Aviva, but you didn’t have women at the top of financial services when I was starting out.” Testosterone-charged visits to lap-dancing clubs were routine. “I was never invited, but you knew that stuff happened.”
Christine Lagarde, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, once claimed that macho risk-taking behaviour had precipitated the 2008 financial crash and “if it had been Lehman Sisters it would have been a different world”. Reeves suspects there is something in this. “More diverse groups of people make better decisions, because you have different perspectives and you get more challenge,” she says. “I also think that when you pick from a very small pool of people, then you’re likely to miss out on an awful lot of talent.”
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She thinks a female chancellor would bring a different viewpoint to the Treasury. “Obviously the first duty of a chancellor is to provide economic stability, and that’s good for everybody. I do think, though, that when chancellors and prime ministers think about industrial strategy or do a visit about infrastructure, they put on a high-vis jacket, a hard hat and they go to a building site or a factory floor. They think that to boost productivity, we need faster rail or more broadband. We need all those things, but the biggest barrier to women going to work is the lack of affordable, high-quality, flexible childcare. Growth and productivity are not just about hard hats and building sites; it’s also about the soft infrastructure that enables women to participate in the labour market.”
If Reeves and Starmer end up as prime minister and chancellor, she is determined to avoid the tempestuous rows that occurred between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. She would prefer to emulate the relationship between Cameron and Osborne. “They worked very well together as a team. You couldn’t play them off against each other.” In general, Reeves argues, women act “in a more collaborative way in politics”.
She was appalled by the recent interview in which Mick Lynch, the general secretary of the train drivers’ union the RMT, attacked the BBC presenter Mishal Husain about her line of questioning on the strikes. “I was listening on the radio with my kids and they said, ‘Who is that and why is he so rude?’ And I think that’s probably what most people listening to that interview would have concluded. He went too far.” She is not going to be joining the striking workers. “I want to govern for the whole country. If we were in government, we wouldn’t be on picket lines. We would be negotiating.” She is not, however, making any promises on pay. “I have been really clear, as shadow chancellor, that I will not announce anything without saying where the money’s going to come from, so I’m not just going to pluck numbers out of the air.”
So far Reeves has been remarkably successful at persuading her shadow cabinet colleagues to maintain discipline about public spending. “Rachel commands real authority and trust,” one frontbencher says. “She’s an incredibly warm and funny person to spend time with, but she has a very hard edge as shadow chancellor. Politics is full of people who duck difficult conversations. Rachel’s not afraid to say, ‘No.’ ”
Reeves thinks that Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous mini-budget has made it easier for her to convince Labour frontbenchers that fiscal responsibility is essential for economic as well as political reasons.
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“If you start announcing a load of things and you can’t say where the money is going to come from, you end up crashing the economy. That’s true, whether it’s unfunded tax cuts or unfunded spending commitments,” she says. “I remember Liz Truss saying that she was fed up of ‘abacus economics’. Well, I think being able to add up in the Treasury is quite important.”
In 1997, Labour promised to match the Conservative spending limits. Will she do the same? “It’s probably going to be another two years to the election. We’ve had four budgets this year,” she replies. “I’m not going to get myself boxed in and say, ‘This is going to be our envelope at the next election,’ because we don’t know what the government’s envelope is going to look like.” But she finds it hard to imagine a scenario in which Labour would go into an election calling for income tax rises. “I don’t want to increase income tax, and I’ve got no intention of doing so.”
Unlike John McDonnell, Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow chancellor, Reeves does not want to overthrow capitalism and she has never read Das Kapital.
“I think the dynamics of capitalism and business creation and investment are good,” she says. “If you want a more equal society, what’s the best way to do it? Is it to lift up those at the bottom or to bring down those at the top? I’d much rather lift up those at the bottom. I’m very aspirational.”
The shadow chancellor has been on what she calls a “smoked salmon and scrambled egg offensive” with business leaders. So far she has met 387 chief executives in 18 months. “I’ve done lots of dinners, but breakfast is my preferred meal of the day. It’s efficient.”
When she was first appointed to the Treasury brief last May, hardly anybody wanted to come. Now they are queuing up to meet Reeves and Starmer.
“It’s gained momentum, partly because we’re doing well in the polls, but also because people are hearing what we’ve got to say and they like it,” she says. “In the end, it’s going to be businesses that create the wealth, the prosperity, the jobs and the opportunities around the country. I don’t think that I’ve got all the answers and all the ideas.”
She disagrees with the former Labour leader Ed Miliband’s division of businesses into “predators and producers”. “I wouldn’t say that. Most businesses that I meet with want to do the right thing.” What about Peter Mandelson’s suggestion that Labour was “intensely relaxed about people being filthy rich so long as they pay their taxes”? “When I say I want people to start up their own businesses [I don’t think], ‘But, good God, don’t get rich out of it.’ We want people to create successful businesses.”
The Treasury modelling shows that immigration is good for growth and Brexit has been bad. But she insists Labour is not contemplating rejoining the single market. “I think that ship has sailed,” she says. “I’m not happy with the status quo, but I honestly don’t think that we can undo the result of the referendum.” She wants immigration to be “managed and controlled. I think people who are coming here to study and contribute, to fill gaps in the labour market, all of that is important. But it’s also a sort of wake-up call that we need to be doing much more to be training up people in Britain to do the jobs that are available. What on earth is going on in our schools and our colleges and universities if there are these high-paid secure jobs in Britain but we haven’t got enough school leavers able to do them? I want more opportunities for people who are here.”
Reeves argues that her plan to remove the tax breaks for private schools to boost the funding of state education is about spreading opportunity rather than engaging in class war. “I went to my local state school. I did really well, but there were lots of kids that didn’t achieve their potential, despite the best will of the teachers. Our sixth form was a couple of prefab huts in the playground, which was baking hot in the summer and freezing cold in the winter. Our school library was turned into a classroom, because there were more children than space and there were never enough textbooks to go round. Do we really believe that a kid at my school had the same opportunities as a kid whose parents were paying £30,000 or £40,000? Our policy is not saying that we don’t recognise some of the good things that private schools do, but our state schools are in desperate trouble. They need investment and I think that’s a better use of that £1.7 billion.”
She thinks the prime minister “was wrong to suggest that if you don’t send your kids to private schools, you’re somehow not aspirational. That is deeply offensive to a lot of people and deeply offensive to me, because my mum and dad were very aspirational.”
Reeves was so proud of her school, Cator Park in Beckenham, that when the London Evening Standard ran an article criticising it, she wrote to complain. The next day the letter had not appeared so she rang up and said if they didn’t publish it she would get every child, parent and teacher in the school to write in. The paper promptly ran the letter. “Our school had its challenges but the teachers were amazing and they did their best,” Reeves says.
She is not embarrassed to be a “girlie swot”. “I think that working hard is really important, and that’s what I was taught when I was growing up. You should make an effort and not waste the talents you’ve got.” When the school boycotted SATs for 14-year-olds, Reeves spent a week sitting outside the staff room by herself at lunchtime doing the exams. “I wanted to know how good I was,” she says. “I always want to push myself. I hate wasting time.” One year she was given an optional science project to do over half-term. Her mum offered to take her to a new shopping centre in Bromley, but she said she would prefer to work on the project. “I was such a sad girl,” she laughs. “If I was getting on the bus, I’d always take my work with me and I’d be sitting there at the back reading.”
Going to university was not normal at her school, but Reeves heard the boys at chess club discussing Oxford and decided she wanted to go there. Her ambition was almost derailed by a grammatical faux pas. “I phoned up Christ Church and I said, ‘Me and two friends want to come to the open day,’ and the lady said, ‘Two friends and I.’ That was really off-putting. So then I phoned up New College instead, because I thought maybe they’ll be a bit more forgiving. I still remember opening the envelope with the offer.”
There may be a degree of self-reliance that comes from a complicated family life. Reeves’ parents divorced when she was seven and so she divided her time between the two in Sydenham and Bromley. It meant she learnt at an early age how to plan ahead, but looking back she doesn’t regret their split. “I knew that they weren’t happy. Obviously I was sad that they got divorced and that we had to move out of the house, but it was definitely the right decision,” she says. “I don’t think growing up in a house where people aren’t happy is good. They always cooperated. At school, quite a lot of teachers didn’t know my parents were divorced, because they’d always come to the parents’ evening together. I don’t feel like it had a detrimental impact.”
She is close to her sister, Ellie, who is now also an MP. “Obviously we argued like all sisters do when we were growing up, but we’d always really stick up for each other as well.”
They are not going to be the Miliband brothers, standing for the leadership against each other. If Ellie wanted to run for the top job, “I would say, ‘Go for it, as long as I can be chancellor,’ ” Reeves says. “Sometimes after PMQs we’ll have lunch together or she’ll come in and support me at Treasury questions. It’s nice having her around, but we don’t overlap.”
Their grandparents were in the Salvation Army and in school holidays the Reeves sisters worked behind the till in the charity’s shop. “My grandad worked in a shoe factory and my grandma had this really awful job untying rope and tying it into shoelaces. The glue in it contributed to quite bad health conditions.”
Reeves has been baptised into the Church of England and her faith is important to her. “I believe in the teachings of the Bible and charity and Christianity and caring for others. I like the coming together of people at church to celebrate and share together. My kids sing in the church choir.”
I ask whether she will move her family into Downing Street if she becomes chancellor. “You sound like my mum,” she replies. “It would be a nice problem to have. I’m not measuring for curtains.” She may not suffer from impostor syndrome, but she does struggle to balance her career with family life. “What I do have is another trait that women in politics have: that you’re never doing anything well enough. There are not enough hours in the day.”
The juggling would get even worse if she becomes chancellor, but she knows it would be worth it. “I am quite well cast,” she says of her current role. “I am sensible. I honestly think that, apart from the ‘shadow’ at the beginning of the title, it’s the ideal job for me. People want a chancellor that they can trust and feel safe with, and I hope when people look at me they do feel those things.”
Is she ready for the Treasury? “I’ve been an MP now for 12 years,” she replies. “All that time I’ve focused on economic stuff: shadow chief secretary, work and pensions, chairing the business select committee. And I’ve been shadow chancellor for a year and a half. How can you prepare? There’s no apprenticeship you can do, but I feel as ready as I can be.”
Shoot credits
Styling Prue White. Make-up Julia Wren at Carol Hayes Management using Clarins. Hair Desmond Grundy at Joy Goodman using Moroccanoil. Red dress,Stella McCartney (mywardrobehq.com); earrings, zara.com and boden.co.uk. Black dress, victoriabeckham.com; shoes, jimmychoo.com
